Through Her Eyes
by Josh.S.999
Summary: An essay on my experience with a homeless women and how chance became fate, became a life lesson.


Through Her Eyes

A lot of people complain about how gray winter is in Cincinnati, but I secretly enjoy it. Between you and me, I think the skies look like the messy palette of an artist who's working on something beautiful. But regardless of the grays, browns, yellows and hints of white passing by my car window, the woman I speak of would have been hard to miss.

She was missing a leg, and had a nice bit of mud running up her side. Her blonde hair was hastily tied up into a ponytail and at a glance she seemed dejected, but there was something beautiful about her. It was rough, _very rough_ , but it was there. The light was turning red and, as fate would have it, traffic stopped at the perfect point for her to be directly to my right. Her clothes were soaked and she didn't react to traffic stopping or going, just stared blankly ahead, completely void of emotion. It felt like helplessness, and, looking back, I think I pitied the state of her existence. _"Pity"_ seems like such a haughty word for me to use, but I have to ask myself, ' _If not for pity or love of life, then for what?'_

You can ponder how far off base I am as much as you'd like, but for now lets continue. Perhaps it was her disability or her wet, muddy sweat pants that moved me to give her money, I can't be sure one way or the other, but I did. She was extremely grateful and explained she needed that exact amount (more or less) to get a new rubber tip for the base of one of her crutches. Earlier that day, she slipped and fell due to it breaking and (as most people would) she wanted to get it fixed.

But that's not what makes this memory so vivid for me; it was all in her eyes. They were a very light blue, a sky blue, but they were dimed by the gray winter sky and strained by a lifestyle with far more hardships then my own. The lines below her eyes added years to a face that wanted to be youthful, but had forgotten what youth was. And the tears now running along these lines spoke of pain and suffering, of being trapped.

What she was feeling was gratitude, but what she made me realize was that I had never really _seen_ gratitude until I met her. Part of me thinks that's what this entire experience was, for me. Maybe, it was one of the first times I thoroughly empathized with someone or _actually_ witnessed true gratitude. When I got home, I meditated on this one moment from every perspective. The experience woke a part of me up I had never felt before, and the more I thought about it, the more moving it became.

I started envisioning myself _as her_ and thinking about what I would do if in her position. I had visions of going to the library and getting email accounts setup. Of looking for all the help I could get in the Greater Cincinnati area and figuring out how to save money long-term. All these wild thoughts about what I could do to _'get out'_ rushed through me, and they made me question what she was thinking about when, her life, _really was her life._ The very notion _'to get out'_ of her situation was a vastly different experience between her and I–a gap, of sorts, that I would never be able to bridge.

I was just a guest, she was _living it_ and as this realization hit me I began to see a story emerge. A fictional one, but it was only fiction because I didn't know the woman I met at a bus stop on Reading Road. It was a sad tale. There were smiles along the way, but it contained more suffering than anything else. She loved, but lost more then she got in return for loving. She made mistakes, but not as many as you'd think. She was human, just like me and something about her experiences trapped her just as much as the circumstances she was in.

So, I came to all these crazy conclusions and realizations, and then… Life just went on. It wasn't negative or anything, I thought of it as a chance encounter I learned from and then it was back to the grindstone. But after a year or so, I was driving down Reading Road and sure enough, _there she was_ –standing at the bus stop in a blue sweatshirt and grey pants with one leg tied up to her waist.

Immediately, I felt the memories from the first time we met fly through my head. I remembered her telling me about the broken crutch and how grateful she was, but more than anything I remembered her eyes and all the emotion they conveyed to me the first time we met. The rush of all these thoughts coming back was surreal–I felt good, the moment _felt_ good, and I was just excited to see her again–so I told her, "Your not going to believe it, but I gave you some money over a year ago and–"

I was just getting ready to expand on my thoughts, but she cut me off, "Yeah, it's been a pretty rough year."

She took the money I handed her and stepped back to where she was, the light turned green and that was it. There was nothing else to say, and as I drove away all of the suspense that was building within me waned, waned into an entirely different emotion–guilt. _How could I overlook something so fundamental_? Seeing her again a year later, for me, represented a journey through _my_ emotions and a personal evolution of sorts. For her, _it represented an entire year of being in the same struggle_.

For one fleeting moment, her pain was my solace. But in hindsight I wonder if it's a coincidence that I _haven't_ seen her at that bus stop ever since. Maybe my reminder of the past year stayed with her in the same way the purity of her gratitude stayed with me, and ultimately helped motivate her to move forward. I hope it did, but I'm not sure if I'll ever get to know.


End file.
